I just finished The Great Gatsby, and my mind is still heavy with the image of Jay Gatsby. He lingers in me like a ghost — dazzling and tragic all at once.
What strikes me is how he wasn’t simply born Gatsby. He was James Gatz, the poor farmer’s son who refused to accept the smallness of his world. That refusal, that wound of dissatisfaction, shaped everything. Into it he poured his dream — of grandeur, of belonging, of something more beautiful than the life he was handed.
And then came Daisy. She wasn’t just a woman to him; she became the embodiment of everything he longed for: wealth, elegance, the promise that the past could be rewritten. I realize now he didn’t truly love Daisy herself — he loved what she symbolized. Perhaps that’s why his love feels so haunting. It wasn’t love, but devotion to an illusion.
Why did Gatsby become such a man? Because he could not accept limits. His soul rebelled against ordinariness. That rebellion gave him the courage to rise, but also blinded him. His hope made him extraordinary, yet it was that same hope that destroyed him.
As I sit with his story, I feel torn between admiration and sorrow. Gatsby reminds me that ambition can lift us, but when it clings too tightly to illusion, it becomes our undoing. His tragedy is not that he dreamed too much, but that he never learned to let go of the dream that was already lost.
And here is where wisdom whispers: dreams give us wings, but wisdom teaches us where to land. To dream is human, but to discern which dreams to release — that is where we grow.
Ripening Wisdom 
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